This invention relates to devices and techniques for vending or dispensing articles, and is especially directed to a dispensing cabinet and technique for efficiently dispensing garments, i.e., hospital scrubs. The invention is more specifically concerned with a belt-type dispenser in which articles of various sizes, such as hospital scrub tops and bottoms, can be dispensed to satisfy customer needs. The technique of this invention concerns loading the hospital scrubs into the machine and dispensing the scrubs in a suitable sequence to minimize customer waiting time and to maximize the dispenser's capacity.
A surgical scrub dispenser is a dispensing machine that controls the accessibility of the scrubs, i.e., the green shirts and pants that are worn in hospital operating rooms. These garments are issued to hospital personnel and serve to prevent contamination between patients and health workers. There are also associated scrub return devices, into which the customer can return the soiled garments. Each of these may be tied to a network in the hospital laundry facility to keep track of the numbers and sizes of scrub tops and bottoms checked out to each of the hospital personnel, and to alert laundry personnel when a dispenser is running out of garments or if the machine becomes jammed or inoperative for some reason.
Hospitals and clinics usually provide scrubs to surgeons, nurses and attendants at no cost to them. For purposes of this discussion, the surgeons, physicians, nurses, visitors, and others who obtain scrubs can be considered "customers." Each customer is permitted to have some limited number of scrubs outstanding at any one time, and is expected to return the scrubs to the return facility when they have been worn or if they become soiled. Traditionally, hospitals would leave a stack of clean scrubs in the changing rooms for the physicians, nurses and staff. These would have a tendency to disappear during the day, and would not be available later in the day or in the evening. This led physicians to hoard scrubs in their locker so they would not be caught without scrubs in the evening. This hoarding has led to shortages, which led to greater hoarding. Another method was to assign a hospital attendant with the task of issuing scrubs to customers, but with no real control or accounting for how many scrubs were dispensed. Soiled scrubs were returned by leaving them in laundry carts in the changing rooms, or simply leaving them lying on the floor of the changing room. However, even with this limited level of control, because the hospital must be open at all times, and because fresh scrubs may be needed in any and all the various surgery facilities within the hospital, staffing the laundry attendant position has become a burden on the hospital. For these reasons, there has been much interest recently in automating the issuance and return of hospital garments. In addition, there remains the need to account for the numbers of scrub tops and bottoms issued to each customer, as well as the need to maintain data concerning scrub usage for purposes of re-stocking.
One example of a vending or dispensing device for hospital garments of this type is described in Fitzgerald et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,638,985. That device attempts to accommodate the fact that hospital garments are cloth and not all the same size by placing clean garments in each of various slot-like compartments, and then employing a system of doors to permit customer access to the compartments to obtain the garments. The scrub dispensing system of that patent has 120 fixed and separate compartments, and each is to contain a top and a bottom folded together. This makes it impossible to obtain just the top or just the bottom, if only one garment becomes soiled and needs to be replaced after a procedure. If it is desired to provide a mixed-size scrub suit where the top and bottom are of different sizes, the laundry attendant would have to load this unusual combination specifically into a slot in the machine. Consequently, mixed sizing of scrubs is difficult logistically and is a major problem to satisfy. Also, to access the slots, there is a system of eight outer doors that each extend across the front of the machine from top to bottom, and a system of vertical extrusions behind them that are movable to provide access to a single slot at a time. Thus for some customers, it is necessary to reach high to an upper slot, or to bend down to a low slot to obtain scrubs. The unit has a card reader or badge reader associated with it to permit customer access, and also has a keypad for entry of customer data, and can be connected to a laundry network to provide data about customer activity and scrub dispenser status.
The system of the above-noted Fitzgerald et al. patent has an associated scrubs return cabinet, which is described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,713,270 and 5,829,349.
It was desired to create a scrubs dispense cabinet with at least the additional advantages of increased capacity, simplicity of design, dispensing of the scrubs at a convenient level so that the customer does not have to stretch or bend to an extreme high or low position It was also desired to be able to dispense scrub tops and bottoms separately. The latter feature would permit the customer to obtain scrubs that are not both the same size, e.g., a large bottom and medium top, or to obtain only a top or only a bottom, if that is what is needed, so as to conserve the scrubs supply.
It is also desired to create a dispensing system and technique that can be used with articles other than hospital garments, such as towels which may be dispensed at a hotel swim pool or fitness facility, or for dispensing other items of various types or sizes, and which are capable of being carried on a web or belt.